CU Athletics

Cal remains on CU's football schedule as nonleague game

SUPERIOR — If Colorado doesn't have the nation's most challenging nonconference football schedule in 2011, CU athletic director Mike Bohn said Thursday he would like to see a more demanding one.

During a "roundtable" meeting with reporters, Bohn made it official that California will remain as the opponent for Colorado's Sept. 10 home date. It will be designated a nonconference game, although CU and Cal will be co-members of the new Pac-12 Conference beginning this summer when CU and Utah expand the current Pac-10.

California will join Hawaii (Sept. 3 in Honolulu), Colorado State (Sept. 17 at Denver's Invesco Field at Mile High) and Ohio State (Sept. 24 in Columbus) on Colorado's 2011 nonconference slate.

"It's going to be exciting for our fans," Bohn said.

Colorado will have only five home games this season instead of the customary six.

CU played at Cal last season, and this year's matchup is the return game of a previously scheduled home-and-home nonconference series. After the Pac-12 was announced in June, both teams attempted to find different opponents for that game but were unsuccessful, Bohn said.

"The good thing is that under the Pac-12 scheduling formula, Cal and Stanford are the teams that Colorado will play less frequently, so facing Cal will be good for our fans," Bohn said.

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"Our goal this season is 25,000 season-ticket holders. I'll be extremely disappointed if we don't exceed that number. We have some great games on the schedule and there is a lot of excitement over new coach Jon Embree and the staff he put together."

Approximately 21,000 season tickets were sold in 2010. The school record is 30,000 season tickets for the 1976 season.

Other topics discussed Thursday include:

• Bohn announced new prices for football season tickets. Several seating sections will include increases in the required Buff Club donations (ranging from $25 to $300 per seat) that are in addition to the price of the tickets. Otherwise, ticket prices will be lower in at least 60 percent of the stadium, Bohn said.

"We anticipate this will not be well received by everybody," Bohn said. "But it's a way to increase donations and have those people feel good about that without raising the prices of all seats. It's the norm across the country."

• Bohn said Colorado has made "significant and aggressive bids" to host NIT and WNIT games this month if the CU men's and women's basketball teams fail to earn bids to the NCAA Tournaments. Either could earn automatic bids by winning the Big 12 Tournament, but that's considered a longshot at best.

• The 7 p.m. CU men's home basketball game Saturday against Nebraska is officially a sellout. That will be the fifth of the season, a record for the Coors Events Center (11,064) that opened in 1979. CU will average about 9,800 fans per conference game this season, a school record surpassing the 9,147 average set in 1984.

• Booster donations to the athletic department are up $300,000 from this time a year ago. "Our future is bright," Bohn said. "We just need to keep moving forward."

Not all kids who play baseball are uniformed with fancy script across their chests, traveling to $1,000 instructional camps and drilled how to properly hit the cut-off man. Some kids just play to play.